As I write this, it is 2 a.m. and I am on a plane to Buenos Aires for the beginning of a two month stay in South America. I will be doing two art residencies, the first in Buenos Aires and the second in Castro, Chiloe, off the coast of southern Chile.
I thought I hated travel as a child. In reality, I was scared of not knowing what to do with myself, because I thought this uncertainty made me a failure. (I might have been an overly concerned eight year old.)
I thought not knowing something made me stupid. I thought changing my mind about what I wanted made me indecisive. So I ended up enrolling in college for engineering to counteract this, then learned very quickly that knowing what was on other side of the equal sign didn’t actually make me smart. It just made my resume look good. Thank God for that lesson, and for every change of direction I’ve taken since then that has taught me how doing the unexpected, the counterintuitive, the uncomfortable, the unpopular, is often what leads us to where we need to be.
As for where we need to be actually is, it’s an ever-evolving answer that follows the equal sign.
Every truth is a lie. By the time this airplane lands, it will be January 20th, my birthday. I’ve spent my whole life until this year believing I had a winter birthday; south of the equator, this has always been a lie. It just took me 27 years to finally experience and expose my dishonesty. Turns out, there is little difference between the rotation of seasons and Schrödinger’s cat.
And yes, that’s an apple with a candle in it.
